Your dreams aren't nonsense—they're messages from your unconscious, speaking in symbols instead of words. Here are five things to know before you start working with them.

We hear a lot about "regulating the nervous system." But what does that mean, really? How do we go about it? And is this something we can effectively do on our own? Let's break it down. "I know I need to do a better job of regulating my nervous system," my new client said. "I feel like I'm always ON, and I don't know how to really ever relax." Like many of my clients, this person had done a lot of work already. She'd read The Body Keeps The Score, she'd been in personal thera

A recent opinion piece from the NYTimes (“Welcome to Stucktopia” by Hillary Kelly) says, “Television has managed to uncannily capture the way life feels right now. We’re all stuck.” Citing popular shows like Severance, Andor, Silo, and Fallout, tell us that “escape is unimaginable, endless repetition is crushingly routine and people are trapped in a world marked by inertia and hopelessness.” This echoes our experience, Kelly says, of being stuck in a meaningless existence:

Maybe a yoga class is the last place you think you'll be running into what Jung called "the shadow." If you've taken a group fitness class in your life, you might think back and recall what you thought or felt about that instructor/teacher. Or you might think about how it seemed that others treated that person. Were they treated as a real person, or as an idealized version of what others think or feel they should be? It's likely that at least some of the class participants (i

The year was 1992. I was a high school freshman in Mr. Eisenblatter’s art class, and the assignment was to draw a potato. The potato sat before me, earthy and prosaic; I struggled to translate the image onto paper. I could see it, but I couldn’t yet convey it. Eisenblatter grew frustrated with my failures. Taking the paper and pencil from me, he drew over my sketch, shading in potato eyes, cross-hatching dirt, masterfully creating the potato illusion that I’d been unable to d

the somatic connection in psychotherapy I'm a big supporter of psychotherapy. In fact, I just started my Master's Degree in Clinical...

Show of hands: how many of us think of the ego as a "bad thing"-- something we should be trying to get rid of? 🙋🏼‍♀️ It's not uncommon...

How do we own what's ours within systems of unequal power distribution? Recently, a friend of mine and her partner found themselves in a fundamental disagreement over how to handle a situation. They're both white, cisgender, able-bodied, raised in upper-middle-class homes. The biggest difference between their social positions is that he is male, she is female. Additionally, he works in STEM and she is a social worker. Our culture values his work more highly than hers, so he m

Many of us learned how to hold our bodies from family or authority figures at a young age. "Pull your shoulders back!" "Don't slouch!," we were told. And so, we learned to stand, and sit, with our ribcage forward, and our shoulders "back." In the gym, we might sometimes hear "proud chest" as a cue not to slouch forward. We tend to think of this as "standing up straight," or having "good posture." But if we take a look at this image of a woman sitting in meditation, we can see

In my last post, we took a look at what we’re actually trying to accomplish when we sit down to meditate. TLDR (too long, didn’t read?):...

Why do we meditate? Or, if we don’t, why do we think we should meditate? For many folks, the goal is to be more mindful. We want to enjoy...

A few weeks ago, over the holidays, I was in line at a Starbucks when the mother of one of the employees came into the store to surprise...

If you’re someone who works with anxiety, you already know how overwhelming it can be. This is especially true for folks with a history...

⁣If you’re like me, you’ve experienced Imposter Syndrome in your lifetime– that sense that you should know more than you do, that you’re...

Of course, we all know that each of us sees things a little differently. For example, if you’re lactose intolerant (or a vegan), dairy...

In 1987, Dr. Francine Shapiro went for a walk. As she walked, she noticed that her eyes were moving from side to side, and that some...

three important lessons from The New York Times’ “Spelling Bee” game I love words and word games. I love etymology, the nuanced imagery that a perfect word evokes, the cultural implications of a word choice. I even love thinking about spelling words. So it’s not terribly surprising that one of my favorite daily activities is the New York Times’ “Spelling Bee” puzzle. It’s a simple enough game: you’re given seven letters and asked to make as many words as you can from the comb

I’m going to say something a little revolutionary here: it’s possible to work hard without feeling absolutely terrible. I think our...

Our intuition is our gut instinct, our deeper knowing, Jung’s “perception via the unconscious,” which guides us when logical information...

Have you ever met a new person and felt an immediate sense of unease or distrust– something about them just doesn’t feel “right”? They...